Jenny Pinder

I'm a 22 year old living in Hull, soon to be living in Leeds. I recently found out I have officially passed my university degree, so now I have a summer of fun to look forward to. At the moment everything in life is falling nicely into place.

The Paralympic Games have been taking the UK by storm with hype and interest. This year the Paralympics are getting a lot of attention via the media, even compared to that of the Olympic Games, which unfortunately seemed to be gaining most of its publicity through product advertisement. It appears that this year could be the biggest Paralympic Games the world has seen so far, even to the point of rivalling the Olympic Games itself through importance and popularity, and putting across a message promoting hard work and perseverance.

So, after the A Level results came around, GCSE results have followed shortly after. Teenagers all over Great Britain are receiving the results that they have been working towards for the last five years. But just like this years A Level results, the focus on GCSEs surrounds the fall in grades compared to that of the previous twenty four years from when the exams began, with a fall in the amount of A* to C grades received. As I suggested in my last article on this years A Level results, this isn’t as big a deal as the ‘professionals’ will make it out to be.

That time of year has once again arrived. The time of year when the future for thousands of young people across the nation decided, the time of year when students everywhere receive their A-level results. Aside from the news about students receiving their results and planning for their future, news has also broke that the number of A-levels being awarded in grades A or A* has fallen for the first time in over two decades.

As Team GB’s success in the Olympic Games increases, is our obsession with medals also on the rise? The Olympic Games is considered worldwide to be the biggest sporting event in history. Every four years the world comes together to take part in healthy competition and good sportsmanship to become part of cultural and sporting history. But at the London 2012 Olympic Games, it seems our obsession with winning medals is making the healthy competition unhealthy.

Before the ceremony, you spend weeks having to plan and book your day; you’ve got to sort out transport, parking, gown hire, tickets, food, photographs, not to mention sorting out who out of your friends and family are going to be attending too. The planning side of graduation alone was incredibly frustrating and stressful; to make it worse it was also very expensive. But when day arrived and the ceremony went on, I had increasingly come to realise the importance of it all, not just for my family but for myself.

Our hometowns mean a lot to us. Wherever you go in life, the place that you were born and bred will always be important to us. It is the place where we consider home. Many of us have a great respect for the place that we grew up, yet when it comes to the hometowns of others, we can be pretty prejudice and judgemental. We have preconceptions and stereotypes of other countries all over the world gained through the media and other types of contact. The French are blasé and the Americans are airheads. Whether we have ever visited a country or met anyone from a country with a well known reputation, we assume that this reputation applies to the entire population. These stereotypes and judgements don’t just apply to those overseas; we can also have these perceptions a little closer to home. There are stereotypes of certain cities where we judge them before even knowing them.

Graduation; it symbolises the end of years of hard work. A graduation ceremony officially marks the end of University and the beginning of the rest of your working life, graduating with the ability to delve into something you really care about and enjoy doing. Graduation is a chance for your family to celebrate all the hard work you have put into your education. You get to wear a Harry Potter esque black gown and hat, and you finally get your degree, official proof of the effort you have put in and the grade you deserve. Then to top it all off you get one last massive night out with your University chums. But the meaning of graduation won’t be the same for everyone. Is it really as important as what you initially think it to be? One can’t help but wonder if the graduation ceremony will live up to the meanings that we assume it to have. I wonder if it will actually turn out to feel as important as what I did when one first started University.

What is life without friends? No bloody fun that’s what. Friends make youth what it is; the best memories of the best years of your life which you share with your mates. School, college, University, jobs, whatever’s happening in your life as a young adult you experience it all with them. Your mates are the people who you spend most of your time with; during University you even live with them. You have fun with them, have a laugh, you trust them, and you can talk to them about anything and everything. But then adulthood sets in, and all those fun, carefree days seem like a distant memory.

It doesn’t matter who you are, or what age you are, every one of us can be called a film fan. Entertainment culture is obsessed by the film and celebrity world, full of actors and actresses who all star in our beloved movies. When thinking about gender in the film world, there are plenty of girly films that we like to settle down to surrounded by a shed load of sweets; films that are focused on women that aim to empower them. These can be action films like Charlie’s Angels, romantic comedies such as Bridget Jones Diary, and drama films like Thelma and Louise. But when considering women in film, in terms of relationships with men, are women really empowered in the film world?

Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents; a program showing young people enjoying a boozy holiday with their friends, blissfully unaware that their parents are secretly watching their antics from nearby and sneaking into their children’s hotel to see how well they are living on their own. All this comes before the parents confront their children about all the embarrassingly shameful things that they have witnessed. It’s cringe worthy and spine-chilling to think about our parents knowing what we get up to on a boozy holiday, never mind them actually being there and watching us.

Pro wrestling. That unique hybrid genre that bends the conventions of melodrama, sporting competition, live entertainment, comedy, theatre and even sadomasochism. Despite its many complexities, pro wrestling has often been…